In 1977, when Alfred D. Chandler's pathbreaking book The Visible Hand appeared, the large, vertically integrated, “Chandlerian” corporation had dominated the organizational landscape for nearly a century. In some interpretations, possibly including Chandler's own, The Visible Hand and subsequent works constitute a triumphalist account of the rise of that organizational form: the large, vertically integrated firm arose and prospered because of its inherent superiority, in all times and places, to more decentralized, market-oriented production arrangements. A quarter century later, however, the Chandlerian firm no longer dominates the landscape. It is under siege from a panoply of decentralized and market-like forms that often resemble some of the “inferior” nineteenth-century structures that the managerial enterprise had replaced.

By the end of the twentieth century, it had become clear that the grand synthesis laid out by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in The Visible Hand, Scale and Scope, and other writings was badly in need of revision. It was in need of revision because the type of enterprise that Chandler took to be the acme of capitalist economic organization–the large, vertically integrated, horizontally diversified, managerially directed corporation–was clearly in retreat. This development cast into doubt not only the substantive content of Chandler’s interpretation but also its methodological underpinnings.

In a series of recent essays, including their contributions to this symposium, Richard N. Langlois and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin (hereafter LRT) present interesting but contradictory views of the decentralized or vertically disintegrated post-Chandlerian economy from whose vantage point they seek to reconceptualize business history. Starting from an orientation that uneasily combines Adam Smith’s ideas about the division of labor with organizational learning, Langlois sees the current situation as dominated by the modularization of production. This modularization and the arm’s-length transactions it facilitates create a world reminiscent of the antebellum United States, although today’s highthroughput differentiated exchanges are underpinned by a set of market-supporting institutions, notably standard interfaces or design rules. Starting from an orientation toward Oliver Williamson and the minimization of coordination costs, LRT in contrast see a world of collaborators joined by long-term, largely informal relations of a distinct type reducible neither to markets nor hierarchies.

During the 1990s, U.S. managerial capitalism underwent a profound transformation from a technocratic to a “proprietary” form. In the technocratic era, managers had functioned as teams to sustain the firm and to promote social welfare by satisfying the demands of competing stakeholders. In the new proprietary era, corporate bureaucratic teams broke up into tournaments in which managers competed for advancement toward the CEO prize. The reward system of the new era depended heavily on stock options that were accompanied by downside risk protection. The tournaments turned managers into a special class of shareholders who sought to maximize their individual utility functions even if deviating from the firm's best interest. Once this new regime became established, managers discarded their technocratic, stakeholder creed and adopted a property rights ideology, originally elaborated in academia by financial agency theorists. Managers hardly noticed (or cared) they were capturing a disproportionate share of the new wealth being generated in the U.S. economy. When critics brought this fact to light, managers replied like well-schooled economists: markets worked efficiently. Whether they worked fairly was a question they did not address.

After World War I, the nonferrous metals trade played a critical role in Britain's preparations for a future European war. Yet it has attracted little attention. The British Metal Corporation (BMC) was formed at the end of the Great War as a state-sponsored corporation to conduct the development of the nonferrous metals industry on behalf of the British state. This article uses the papers of the BMC to explore the politics of a strategically vital trade, the functioning of the British state's institutional memory, and the role of business in appeasement and rearmament. It concludes that the state-sponsored corporation was, on balance, an effective strategic instrument. Although politics, trade, and strategy proved difficult to reconcile with one another, the pursuit of profit did not dictate business attitudes toward Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Today Philips is one of the largest foreign investors in East Asia. The foundation for the company's East Asian position was laid by investment in Taiwan in the 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when this country and the rest of the region were still largely ignored by other European investors. This article investigates the motives for Philips to play a pioneering role among European firms in large-scale investing in Taiwan. The author uses the traditional method for direct investment analysis, known as Dunning's eclectic paradigm. He also addresses shortcomings in this method regarding individual company behavior, by adding a corporate governance analysis that is based on Freeman's stakeholder theory. The resulting analysis shows that, although locational factors constituted the main precondition to direct investment by Philips, the crucial reason Philips made its early investments in Taiwan was its chief executive officer's enthusiasm for this particular project.